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Networking Social Scholarship…Again Martin, Shawn. 2019. Networking Social Scholarship…Again. KULA: knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation studies 3(1): 10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/kula.47 RESEARCH ARTICLE Networking Social Scholarship…Again Shawn Martin Indiana University, US [email protected] This paper proposes to answer several questions that arise from the actions of American scientists between 1840 and 1890. How did the broader organization of science in the late nineteenth century create a system of professional disciplines? Why did the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) form, and why did specialized societies like the American Chemical Society (ACS) later found an organization separate from the AAAS? Why did these professional societies create journals, and how did these journals help to communicate science? This paper combines both quantitative textual analysis and qualitative historical and sociological methods within the context of nineteenth-century American science. It is hoped that by broadening the methods used, and by better understanding the early deliberations of scientists before there was a formal scholarly communication system, it may be possible to contextualize current debates about the need for changes in the scholarly communication system. Keywords: Scholarly communication; publishing; history of science Introduction In the digital age, technological change and evolving scholarly practices have transformed the ways in which university faculty communicate their work. In the twenty-first century, the scholarly communication system is a complex social mechanism encompassing publishers, peer-reviewers, tenure committees, and many other actors. According to Christine Borgman (2000), the most essential element of the scholarly communication, or academic publishing, system is the journal article, which has remained ‘remarkably stable and print publication continues unabated, despite the proliferation of digital media’ (413). Journals have a long history dating perhaps as far back as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665. The first American scientific journal, however, has a much shorter history. One could possibly date American scientific journals back as far as 1745 with the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, a journal dedicated to all knowledge and founded by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia. Over time, however, Franklin’s journal became rather localized and competed with other local scientific journals in cities such as New York and Boston. It was not until 70 years later, with the American Journal of Science, founded by Benjamin Silliman of Yale University in 1819, that the United States had a journal that was both consistently published and dedicated only to science. Simon Baatz (1991) argues that the American Journal of Science was the primary journal for science for most of the nineteenth century and brought together divergent metropolitan groups in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston in ways that more localized journals, such as the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, did not. There was, however, another important element to the networking of scholarship beyond the journal in late nineteenth-century America: the professional association. Alexander Dallas Bache, one of the early founders of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a collaborator with Benjamin Silliman, stated in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that, ‘While Science is without organization, it is without power: powerless against its enemies, open or secret; powerless in the hands of false or injudicious friends’ (1852, lii–liii). Bache’s statement was a call for scientists to begin to organize, and, partially because of Bache’s efforts, scientists began to do just that over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; what they built transformed into a system of scholarly societies, universities, and other knowledge organizations. Therefore, by looking not only at journals and the Art. 10, page 2 of 11 Martin: Networking Social Scholarship…Again ways that they form in nineteenth-century America, but also at the formation of professional associations and the ways that such associations affected journals, one can begin to understand the complex network of scholarly communication, and perhaps think about ways that the current professional network may need to develop. For this paper, a multi-method approach is utilized to investigate the formation of scholarly communication in the United States circa 1840 to 1900, including both qualitative sociological-historical and quantitative computational-statistical approaches to exploring the topic, with the intent of better understanding how professional organizations and academic journals interact with each other. To explore the evolution of journals during this period, topic modeling and other computational and statistical methods are used on scientific journals of the period, including the American Journal of Science and the Journal of the American Chemical Society, to see how some of the more prominent American scientific journals of the mid to late nineteenth century reflected the power dynamics within the nascent organization of science in the nineteenth-century United States. Overall, the goal of this paper is to demonstrate that combining quantitative topic modeling and qualitative historical analysis methods can provide a more nuanced understanding of the origins of the scholarly communication system. Combining these methods provides a unique approach that demonstrates how traditional historical methods and computational techniques can work together to inform understanding of complex social systems. The sub-discipline of scholarly communication within information science largely relies on quantitative analysis of citation patterns and relies on the sociological theories of scholars such as Robert Merton. This paper draws on a broader array of historical and sociological study and expands the conversation about how social forces shape journals at a time when scholarly communication in the United States was first beginning. In the twenty-first century, the scholarly communication system comprises a complex community mechanism encompassing university faculty, scholarly societies, publishers, peer-reviewers, tenure committees, librarians, funding agencies, and many other actors. Advocates hoping to change the scholarly communication system and make knowledge more available must also understand how the journal article became so important and recognize the scientific power structures governing the production of journal articles. The nineteenth-century power structures which originated the current scholarly communication system had very different goals and a very different conception of how research should be shared. The current barriers to creating a more equitable system of scholarly communication have their origins in a nineteenth-century, industrially-oriented publishing organization. Repositioning the power of scholarly communication toward a more truly open-access system will require a more thorough understanding of its historical development and potential ways to overcome one hundred years of previous practice. Literature Review Much of the earlier work on scholarly communication, including that of Borgman, focuses on the structure of scholarship as measured by scientometric analysis. Current scholarly communication research is largely based on the ideas of Robert Merton (1968), who concentrated on the values of twentieth-century science and on achieving status within scientific professions. Some scholars, such as Scott Frickel and Neil Gross (2005), have, however, criticized Merton’s suppositions, saying, ‘we find it difficult to believe that the quest for prestige and status is the sole motive shaping intellectual innovation’ (211). In other words, Frickel and Gross argue that there may be other factors beyond prestige that influence the development of scientific and intellectual movements. In light of this criticism, it is important to ask whether there may be other frameworks that can help to understand the process of scholarly communication. One way to address the criticism of Frickel and Gross—that could also supplement Merton’s arguments about prestige and status—is to address the broader historical and sociological literature on professionalization and journals. Andrew Abbott (2005) discusses how professions are created when organizations, such as universities and scientific societies, operationalize workflows in order to meet common goals. According to Abbott, such operationalization processes create ‘linked ecologies’ that in turn form a ‘hinge mechanism’ that provides a way for both universities and professional societies to effectively interact with each other (2005, 255). For scholarly communication, one could argue that one of the hinge-mechanisms that has developed over time is the academic journal. The question is how to investigate how social changes are reflected in journals over the period of 1840–1890, when scientific associations were first forming. Topic modeling and textual analysis methods are possible ways to investigate a large corpus of journals. Emily Marshall (2013) has utilized textual analysis methods, such as text mining and topic modeling, on research articles in twentieth-century British and French scientific journals to identify linguistic contexts of articles in relation to social institutions,
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